Starts off well, then...

Rating: Null/10 (9 June 2003)

Spoilers in this review!!!
This film does start off quite well. We see the central character Jim (played by young Irish actor Cillian Murphy) wandering through a deserted London and looking suitably bemused by the whole experience. Accepting that there has been an apocalyptic devastation of the population, it all rolls along reasonably plausibly for the first hour or so. Jim, alone at first, teams up with some other survivors and together they fend off the rage-fuelled, zombie-like "infected". The acting is fine and the script is okay, and the film looks great and it has some fairly tense moments.
***Spoilers now***
But things start to go wrong when they reach the army outpost. In my opinion, the films goes totally off the rails. No satisfactory reason is offered as to why the soldiers are so malevolent, and I find their behaviour highly unbelievable. I would say the same about Jim's revenge scenario. That this mild-mannered, unarmed youth suddenly turns into a calculating, and extremely effective, killing machine smacks of the absurd. The film ends rather too quickly as well, as if the writers simply couldn't be bothered anymore.
Despite all that, the first two-thirds of the film is good entertainment and I would recommend it if you like the premise of people trying to come to terms with the whole post-apocalyptic thing. For this I rated it 6 out of 10, but beware because it does degenerate badly towards the end.